Pledge your support/Soutenez-nous, Engagez-vous

What are you doing already to try to change the problems all refugees face in Calais Jungle, and across Europe?

What support can you, personally or as an organisation, offer to support any demands the hunger strikers make now while they say they are determined to continue until their needs are met?

The action these men are taking tells you that the border kills as surely as an Iranian death sentence.

They are not the first people to say this. Here, there is the list of known deaths in Calais from 2002 onwards. 26 died in 2015 alone, 19 in 2014. These men are prepared to risk their lives in a desperate effort to highlight the urgency of the situation, but if every one of them were to die, and no more deaths happened at the border in 2016, this would be an improvement on last year’s border violence.

ARE YOU LISTENING YET? What are you prepared to do? Are you prepared to support refugees to undertake initiatives to improve the situation for each other – financially, logistically, with whatever expertise and power you have? Are you prepared to do this when it means supporting refugees even if they make choices that you don’t personally agree with?

How can YOU, with the power you, personally have, help these activists continue to have their voices heard and develop their initiative to try to change things for all refugees in the Calais Jungle?

They cannot wait to eat again for the governments with real power to change things – they will die. But how can they know that people looking at them now are not just crying for them – that they will actually help?

What can you promise – to help now, to offer help in a week’s time, a month’s time, and a year’s time?

How can you work, under the direction of refugees’ initiatives, to change things?

If you want these men to start eating, you must give them evidence that people are not all like Veronique from the UNCHR about whom the hunger strikers say:

“She needed to have been talking to some of the people in the Jungle from each community not just the hunger strikers. We are wondering if she just comes because she is curious to see if we have really sewn our lips like all the journalists who have been knocking on our door everyday. She saw all nine of us with our lips sewn. But we are interested in people visitng us who want to work with us to change the situation here. Not people who want to persuade us to stop our action.”